Marc Beauchamp: Bong Show: Redding's pot-smoking celeb

Given the north state's budding marijuana culture perhaps it's not surprising that we've cultivated a bonafide cannabis celebrity.

In terms of marijuana ingested on camera, "Cheech and Chong" have nothing on "Soundrone," a Redding-area Internet personality I stumbled across recently when I happened to Google "Redding" and "marijuana." His YouTube channel claims to have 16,000-plus subscribers and 2.8 million video views, the "Soundrone Army," he calls it.

His video broadcasts are minimalist: basically Soundrone talks into the camera on his computer while smoking massive amounts of pot in one of his elaborate water pipes. "Medicating with Sound," is how he puts it.

On camera, Soundrone wears rim-less glasses, a neatly trimmed goatee and his curly dark brown hair appears to be pulled back in a ponytail — in short, he probably wouldn't stick out in the line at the tire store or supermarket. Definitely doesn't resemble your stereotypical druggie mug shot.

After a couple of hits that would leave a normal person in a state of catatonia, Soundrone then embarks on a stream-of-consciousness monologue. In a recent broadcast he talked about vainly searching for a gas station with air to inflate a leaky car tire. Instead of air he found car vacuum stations for the handicapped, which took his rant in an entirely different direction.

But Soundrone isn't just a pothead, he's a performer with a sense of what he needs to attract and keep an audience. For example he periodically offers how-to tips on building your own pot paraphernalia.

And he recently ran a contest — giving away an elaborate wooden stash box to the viewer who came closest to guessing the weight of the marijuana buds in a gallon glass jar he flourished almost pornographically in front of the camera.

Soundrone's also an entrepreneur with several websites. One is devoted to what he describes as a lung-friendly alternative to using butane lighters to fire up your bong. In one YouTube video, recorded at a Bay Area cannabis "celebration" last year, he promotes Bee Lasso, his Redding-based company that makes a hemp-based (how appropriate!) wick dipped in beeswax. (Bee Lasso, however, doesn't seem to do much for the hacking cough that erupts every time Soundrone takes a big toke on his waterpipe.)

After an hour poking around Soundrone's YouTube channel I decided that I tend to prefer his less-over-the-top earlier comedic attempts, before he adopted the "Soundrone" persona.

Examples include the "Stoner diet" (after his girlfriend bugs him to eat healthier food he takes up cupcakes with orange-flavored frosting for the vitamin C supposedly therein) and "All my weed is gone" (peeved at his girlfriend for baking all his pot into brownies he gets back at her by eating the entire batch, with predictable results).

Funny? You kinda had to be there, or have grown up with Cheech and Chong.

Who says heavy pot smoking invariably kills ambition? Soundrone is certainly no couch potato. That said, if Soundrone does have a day job I hope it doesn't involve operating heavy machinery.

The Lions roar

Recently I endorsed the notion of a small sales tax increase to pay for more cops, deputies and jail space in Redding and Shasta County. I poll tested the idea last week at a meeting of the Enterprise Lions Club at the Country Waffle on Athens Avenue. These are mostly older folks, thoughtful, well-informed (newspaper readers, bless them) and voters.

The good news: The group universally supported the idea as long as the money raised would be used solely for public safety.

The bad news: The group almost as unanimously expressed distrust that politicians or bureaucrats in Redding or anywhere in California wouldn't eventually divert the money for other purposes. And who can blame them? Well, so much for that idea.

Beyond labels

The last word goes to commenter John Harris, who all the way from New Jersey weighed in on last week's column, headlined "Did the GOP wreck Shasta County?" Harris implored readers to think and move beyond what he called the false choices of "left" and "right," "Democrat" and "Republican." An excerpt (I'll post his entire comment on my blog today):

"Far too many of us — probably a fatal number of us at this point — have fallen for the scam that what takes place in the halls of government is actually a contest of ideas and philosophies. It isn't, folks. While you are trying to figure out which cup on the table hides the magician's pea, his associates are picking your pockets and recruiting your children to fight, be maimed, or die as witless soldiers in a criminal syndicate.

"Unless and until the great mass of us drop the labels, withdraw from politics as usual, and start seeking true common ground based on our individual rights to life, liberty, and property, this scam will continue until a tiny elite rules over a wholly-impoverished, enslaved multitude."